Loomis and I had made our way through the humidity to the student union to pick up cokes to get us through another tropical afternoon. I was fulminating about something – the heat, the racial layering on campus, students mostly white, faculty nearly all white, service and administrative staff almost entirely black. I was just settling into my rant, with “It’s 1983 already, Goddammit,” when Loomis turned around and quietly said, “My, you are one angry young woman.” I had not realized how miserable I was at times, and how that misery turned to anger.
Friday night, no friendships yet, nothing to do but swelter. I got in my beat -up Nova and barreled out to Folly Beach, driving to the south end of the island, where the Atlantic House Restaurant and OTO (Over the Ocean) Bar perched on tall pilings as advertised, above the incoming tide. I found a table for two on the outdoor deck, ordered a gin and tonic, and set about writing letters to friends and family, trying to convey what it felt like to be so unmoored and so frequently overheated. Gradually, the sound of the surf slowed my heartbeat, the offshore breeze took my skin down a few degrees. Thinking over my week, trying to write it down, a pod of dolphins surfaced beneath me; a line of pelicans dipped and rose along the shoreline. I ordered a drink and an expensive shrimp dish. This spot, this haven, was mine on Friday nights, a fact to be reckoned with.
Later on, I found others to share Friday nights with. Kathy had an active social life, Mike and Norma had their twins to contend with, so Loomis was my most frequent companion in that first year. He had already finished a one-year stint in West Virginia, and had done his PhD at the University of North Carolina, so he seemed more acclimated to the South.
“But I’m originally from Jamestown, so I’m an upstate New Yorker, too,” he told me on one of our first outings.
“I’m looking for a church with a good choir I can join.” He loved to sing, and had a good, deep baritone.
“I think Grace Episcopal will be the one.”
When Hugo hit in 1989, wind and rough waters reduced the Atlantic House to a mass of splinters and a few remaining pilings, which have grown smaller every year from wind and tide. Nothing lasts forever, not even righteous anger.
This Friday night, I dined alone with the dolphins below and the pelicans above. I had been writing for a while after my plate had been taken away. The waiter came in the dusk, with lifted eyebrow.
“I’ll have another gin and tonic,” I said.
INSTANT NOODLES 